This week, Amazon announced a slew of new offerings at its AWS division Re:invent conference in Las Vegas. These include AWS AppSync, a serverless service for real-time data queries, Amazon GuardDuty, a new security monitoring solution, and five new artificial intelligence APIs.

Despite the infinite compute power of the cloud and all the machine learning and artificial intelligence that thrives on that compute power, technology just falls short of our expectations. Which is exactly what happened when one developer gave Microsoft's Bing Speech Recognition API a whirl.

Amazon announced an update to the Alexa Skills Kit that will let developers take control of how Alexa speaks. SSML Speechcons can spice up Alexa's pronunciation for the sake of clarity, emphasis, or just for fun. Listening to Alexa is a painful reminder that computers still don't know how to speak.